In addition to basic location awareness, PostGIS offers many features rarely found in other competing spatial databases
such as Oracle Locator/Spatial and SQL Server. Refer to PostGIS Feature List for more details.

License

PostGIS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2 or later).
Refer to License FAQ for more information.
PostGIS is developed by a group of contributors led by a Project Steering Committee.

News

What's happening right now

The PostGIS development team is pleased to announce the release of PostGIS 2.4.0alpha.
This is the first version to support PostgreSQL 10.
Best served with PostgreSQL 10beta2.
See the full list of changes in the news file.

Tips

The error ‘postgis.backend’ is already set comes up every so often in PostGIS mailing list.
The issue arises often during or after an upgrade. I’ll go over causes for this I am aware of and how to fix.

The question goes something like this

After upgrading to Postgis 2.3 from 2.1, my server log is
filled with these messages :

“WARNING ‘postgis.backend’ is already set and cannot be changed until
you reconnect”

Case Studies

Nautilytics is a small data visualization and GIS startup based out of Boston, MA.
We use PostGIS and PostgreSQL, among other open-source tools to build powerful web applications
for US government organizations, public, and private sector companies.

I used extensively postgis (+ecosystem) for my phd thesis, in several ways.
The first is that PostGIS is a good steady horse (elephant?):
a database is the perfect place to store a lot of very different information in the same place and put them in relation.
For geospatial data, postgis means you always have a way to put data in relation (are they at the same place?).